Seeing on my desk a copy of Crime and Human Nature by James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein,¹ a colleague asked if that was the book arguing that “crime is biological.” It does not, but it is easy to see how and why he came to think so. A front-page feature story about the book in a local newspaper carried the headline: “Do Genes Cause Crime?” The Phil Donahue show discussing it began with blowups of the three major body types, with much of the program centering on the contribution of physique to criminal behavior. In another newspaper story, a civil-rights leader describes the work as “racist trash.”

Needless to say, Crime and Human Nature is not racist. But neither is it biological in emphasis, nor does it for that matter argue for any specific approach to the understanding of crime. A glance at the Table of Contents tells us that only a small portion treats the biological evidence—truth to tell, there really is not that much to treat, it having been a taboo topic in criminology until very recently. The greater part of the text considers social, economic, and cultural studies: there are chapters on the family, the community, labor markets, the mass media, historical changes, and so on. Nor is the book a brief, in the sense of marshaling its evidence toward a given conclusion. To the contrary, we sense throughout a stubborn determination to examine scrupulously all important lines of evidence and theory. The tone is Apollonian, avoiding “brilliance,” easy arguments, facile conclusions. It has received its most generous praise from insiders, who are quick to appreciate its graceful mastery of a vast, difficult, often chaotic body of knowledge.

The publicity given to the book's putative biologism, and its equally putative neoconservatism, has kept attention away from what is genuinely distinctive in its approach—a consistent, systematic emphasis on the motives of the criminal offender, on his personality, and on the origins of both in the family. Why are some persons more disposed—drawn? driven?—to crime than others? It is a question Wilson and Herrnstein are always prepared to consider, even when discussing matters seemingly remote from issues of motivation and personality. Still, one may wonder why asking that question persistently makes this book distinctive. We would expect it to be one of the two or three central questions of criminology. In fact, it is not. Although psychological studies do not suffer quite the pariah status of biological or genetic approaches to crime, they are nevertheless seen as secondary, even infra dig. The result has been serious imbalances and distortions in our grasp of crime.

Through a curious division of intellectual labor, criminology has for many years been a territory occupied largely by sociology and such immediate neighbors as social work. Most textbooks are written by sociologists; at most universities courses are taught in that department, and the major research studies have been done by scholars trained in that discipline. At the same time, psychology—ordinarily a sort of PacMan of the social sciences, that is, busy, ambitious, imperial, eager to gobble up all the subject matter in sight—has remained strangely diffident. My own department, which offers hundreds of courses, some of them on arcane topics, does not list a single class on crime or delinquency, nor does it provide clinical or formal research training in the area. The abnormal-psychology textbook I use, which is typical in this respect, has two chapters on schizophrenia and one-third of a chapter on the antisocial personality—not an unfair proportion in view of the relative quantity of information at hand. Every now and again a psychologist or psychiatrist will amble into the territory, led there by accident or idiosyncrasy, but while he may produce interesting or even brilliant individual work, that will not itself tend toward a tradition of inquiry. Hence, psychological writing on crime has until recently focused upon special problems, e.g., such forensic issues as the nature of legal insanity, or on special cases, e.g., bizarre or exotic criminal careers. And that, paradoxically, has strengthened the existing view that psychology has little to say either about crime generically or about the dynamics of “ordinary” crime, which remain the province of sociology.

This view has penetrated the consciousness of educated citizens and is now a shibboleth, which we hear in the nearly reflexive statement that the origins of crime are “social.” Undergraduates will tell you so quite firmly, and so for that matter will mental-health practitioners. It is not unusual to hear psychologists or psychiatrists, in the course of talking about an especially aberrant act of crime, pause to exclude ordinary crime from the realm of psychopathology, offering a pious reminder that the average offender is a victim of poverty or economic inequality, or the frustrations stemming therefrom.

There is something odd about this insistence. If someone uses a gun to shoot himself, it is an event explained variously by such concepts as narcissistic injury, or the presence of hostile introjects, or low levels of the chemical 5HIAA. If someone uses a gun to shoot someone else in the course of a robbery, it is an event explained by the unemployment rate. Yet that latter idea, even in its more sophisticated versions, will not resist the simplest probing: e.g., crime rates will often rise during periods of prosperity; most poor people do not turn to crime; in some instances the most impoverished groups in a community have the lowest crime rates. These are among the cogent examples given by Wilson and Herrnstein, whose learned and complex analysis of the etiology of crime should once and for all free us from a monotonic sociologism. Still, one never can tell; something more than simple-mindedness may be at work.

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Despite their continuing popularity in the public mind, and among many intellectuals, psychological modes of analysis have been in disfavor not only in the academic study of crime but throughout much of social science. The concept of personality itself has been steadily, successfully devalued during the last two decades, astonishingly enough by psychologists specializing in the study of personality. A recent president of the major scholarly society devoted to the topic made his reputation by debunking personality as an important determinant of behavior. For a number of years, the most prestigious journal in the field published only a handful of papers on personality, devoting most of its pages to social psychology. A prevailing doctrine in personality theory, likely the most influential, holds our behavior to be determined not by what lies within us, by traits or needs or will, but by what situations call out in us, that is, by “reality,” as it is or as we understand it to be.

A celebrated study in abnormal psychology—it is said to be the most widely reprinted article in the field—illustrates the general approach. A normal person is secretly admitted into a mental hospital as a psychiatric patient, and, carrying that designation, is treated as such by the staff, although he behaves “normally,” that is, non-psychotically. One is to be led to the inference that we are “mad” only largely because we are so seen, madness being less an intrinsic than an attributed state. It is only one of a much larger number of experiments where the pressures of the situation are shown to overwhelm human disposition. We see what we expect to see, or are told to see; we do what the situation requires us to; we are or become what is imputed to us to be or become.

In the face of this onslaught, the study of the person did not disappear, not quite, but it did diminish visibly in range, energy, and confidence. The description and measurement of personality, once a lively and at times stormy topic, fell into a kind of lassitude. It became the conventional (and erroneous) wisdom that the projective tests were not to be trusted; they were given up as research instruments, and to some degree in clinical assessment as well. It was argued in many quarters that there was little demonstrable consistency to the personality, that someone at forty was likely to be entirely different from the same person at thirty or fifty; so even if one could measure the person accurately—and was that not in question?—one might well be measuring a will-o'-the-wisp. These doubts grew, came together, reinforced one another. Personality psychology was enfeebled. Much of its subject matter was taken over by neighboring approaches, by the newly ascendant cognitive psychology, to a lesser degree by physiological approaches, and above all by social psychology.

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Why did it happen so easily, and why did it happen when it did? To begin with, the deep and careful scrutiny of the person had never come easily to American academic psychology. It was initially a European import, and one that did not quite take, unlike so many others. The American tendency has been Lockean, at home with an idea of the person as empty and infinitely open to experience. The flight from the study of personality may also reflect that flight from fixed identity which surfaced in American life about two decades ago, expressing itself in such phenomena as transsexual surgery and androgynous dress and manners. Above all, the decline of personality study probably reflects the aversion against “labeling” or “stigma” or “blaming the victim” which has so dominated writing on social issues in recent years. Those deviant were not to be seen as deviant intrinsically, or immutably, or through apparent deficiencies of will, temperament, or ability. They were to be understood entirely as creatures of circumstance, or as targets of false attribution. One finds it hard to believe that social science has ever been much given to “blaming the victim”—its besetting sins being, rather, irrelevance and abstractness—yet the fear of doing so, or even seeming to do so, kept it from giving due attention to the structure and dynamics of the personality.

What began as moral generosity—the wish to avoid stigmatizing others—soon developed into fixed habits of thought and then into taboos and superstitions, some of these so clearly at odds with the real world that they were not long sustained. The risks of intellectual dogma are demonstrated quite clearly in the recent history of schizophrenia. For many years, the better scholars of the syndrome understood it to be an extraordinarily complex disorder, multifaceted and with multiple origins, not likely to be solved by a single breakthrough or by a simple intellectual solution. That ambiguity proved difficult to bear, and a fierce factionalism developed. A zealous, reductionistic environmentalism held sway for some time, its rigidities encouraging the growth of an equally zealous, reductionistic biologism—the two camps, strangely enough, fusing their conceptual errors to help bring about the destruction of our mental-hospital system. The environmentalists, suspecting schizophrenia to be caused or encouraged by the custodial conditions designed to treat it, were eager to try “real life” as a cure, while the biologicals believed that they had or would soon invent a magical pill which would rid us of the disorder altogether.

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Schizophrenia and criminality are by no means parallel cases, yet in both instances scholarly belief has been conditioned by larger currents of ideology. The refusal for so many years to accept a genetic component in the psychoses, despite strong evidence for it, is akin to the de-facto dismissal of psychological variables in the study of crime. Crime and Human Nature has an interesting discussion of the fate of a landmark longitudinal study carried out by the pioneering criminologists, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck. In the late 1930's they initiated a comparison of carefully matched groups of delinquent and non-delinquent youngsters. Their findings are rich and revealing: that signs of a troubled, rebellious personality are generally evident well before adolescence; that the two types of youngsters can be successfully distinguished in blind analyses, through tests of personality, the delinquents being rated as impulsive and resentful, the non-delinquents as overcontrolled and somewhat depressive; and that patterns of discipline are different in the two types of families, the parents of delinquents tending to be, variously, overly severe, or overly lax, or erratic. These studies tell us quite plainly that delinquency enters early and stays late—the follow-up statistics at age thirty-one are especially horrendous, the delinquent group accounting for a truly extraordinary amount of serious crime, a great deal of it violent. About one-third of that sample spent five or more years in jail during the time they were seventeen-to-twenty-five years of age.

The Glueck project had the methodological weaknesses typical of its era, yet these seem not to have been crippling. Later and more carefully controlled work confirmed and in fact extended and deepened the major findings. The findings, showing as they do a strong association among delinquency and personality and family patterns, remind us that sociological and economic variables, although necessary, are not sufficient for an adequate grasp of criminal behavior. Nevertheless, the Gluecks' research has been criticized severely, and underwent a long and—I believe—continuing period of neglect. The dissonance between the data and the prevailing theoretical view was handled, as it so often is, by a condescending dismissal of the research. The topic was dropped, that is, forgotten, set aside, not so much assassinated as sent, in disgrace, into exile.

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One would like to believe that a banished idea gathers strength in the wilderness and returns toughened and more resourceful. That did not happen here: the early neglect of psychological ideas in the study of crime has produced some continuing weaknesses, which to some degree are hidden from us because of the superb expository skills Wilson and Herrnstein bring to the task. They give us the illusion that we know more than we do. We do not, for example, have an adequate taxonomy of criminal motivations or personality types. We compare offenders and non-offenders, or offenders by frequency of arrest, or by age, or by type of crime committed—all well and good, and often illuminating, but too crude to allow much understanding of individual psychological differences disposing to crime. We work almost exclusively with aggregated data—a sure sign that the research is at an early and underdeveloped stage.

Another limitation stems from the absence of a substantial contribution from psychoanalysis or other psychodynamic schools of thought. These disciplines draw their knowledge largely from individual therapy, meaning those who seek it out voluntarily, hoping to profit from it—neither of which is likely to be true for those criminally inclined. The good patient looks within himself, ready to search out his motives, often in a mood of self-doubt or self-reproach. The criminal personality tends to quick action and unrelenting self-justification.

In the absence of direct clinical data, there has been some effort to extrapolate from observations made elsewhere, often with surprising success. One of the most interesting sections of the Wilson-Herrnstein book discusses the application of “attachment theory,” developed from studies of very young children, to the patterns found in delinquent families. It is not hard to think of other possibilities. We can learn a great deal from recent advances in the study of borderline and severely disturbed personalities; and we know a great deal about variations in superego formation and structure, far more than we have yet applied to the nuances of criminal motivation.

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So the ideas are there, but to exploit them we will first have to give up that resistance to the psychological which seems to possess us when we hear the phrase “social problems.” It is becoming clear that we will not be able to think intelligently about such matters as pandemic drug abuse (throughout the society) or poor school achievement (in the middle class as elsewhere) or unmarried teen-age mothers until we understand far more than we now do about motives, incentives, inhibitions, defenses, displacements, controls; and it is also clear that little of the recent writing on these matters offers us a clue. We gaze on the actors from a great distance, sometimes inventing a merely imagined notion of their experience, more often retreating to the current clichés of social science.

¹ Simon and Schuster, 639 pp., $22.95.